1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of wafer direct bonding at room temperature, and more particularly to the bonding of substrates for the fabrication of engineered substrates, encapsulation, and three-dimensional device integration using the effects of, and combined effects of, fluorine and ammonium in dielectrics, especially in a silicon oxide layer.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the physical limits of conventional CMOS device are being approached and the demands for high performance electronic systems are imminent, system-on-a chip (SOC) is becoming a natural solution of the semiconductor industry. For system-on-a chip preparation, a variety of functions are required on a chip. While silicon technology is the mainstay technology for processing a large number devices, many of the desired circuit and optoelectronic functions can now best be obtained from individual devices and/or circuits fabricated in materials other than silicon. Hence, hybrid systems which integrate non-silicon based devices with silicon based devices offer the potential to provide unique SOC functions not available from pure silicon or pure non-silicon devices alone.
One method for heterogeneous device integration has been the hetero-epitaxial growth of dissimilar materials on silicon. To date, such hetero-epitaxial growth has realized a high density of defects in the hetero-epitaxial grown films, largely due to the mismatches in lattice constants between the non-silicon films and the substrate.
Another approach to heterogeneous device integration has been wafer bonding technology. However, wafer bonding of dissimilar materials having different thermal expansion coefficients at elevated temperature introduces thermal stresses that lead to dislocation generation, debonding, or cracking. Thus, low temperature bonding is desired. Low temperature bonding is also desired for the bonding of dissimilar materials if the dissimilar materials include materials with low decomposition temperatures or temperature sensitive devices such as, for example, an InP heterojunction bipolar transistor or a processed Si device with ultrashallow source and drain profiles.
The design of processes needed to produce different functions on the same chip containing different materials is difficult and hard to optimize. Indeed, many of the resultant SOC chips (especially those at larger integration size) show a low yield. One approach has been to interconnect fully processed ICs by wafer adhesive bonding and layer transfer. See for example Y. Hayashi, S. Wada, K. Kajiyana, K. Oyama, R. Koh, S Takahashi and T. Kunio, Symp. VLSI Tech. Dig. 95 (1990) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,563,084, the entire contents of both references are incorporated herein by reference. However, wafer adhesive bonding usually operates at elevated temperatures and suffers from thermal stress, out-gassing, bubble formation and instability of the adhesive, leading to reduced yield in the process and poor reliability over time. The adhesive may also be incompatible with typical semiconductor manufacturing processes. Moreover, adhesive bond is usually not hermitic.
Room temperature wafer direct bonding is a technology that allows wafers to be bonded at room temperature without using any adhesive resulting in a hermitic bond. It is not prone to introduce stress and inhomogeneity as in the adhesive bonding. Further, if the low temperature bonded wafer pairs can withstand a thinning process, when one wafer of a bonded pair is thinned to a thickness less than the respective critical value for the specific materials combination, the generation of misfit dislocations in the layer and sliding or cracking of the bonded pairs during subsequent thermal processing steps are avoided. See for example Q.-Y. Tong and U. Gosele, Semiconductor Wafer Bonding: Science and Technology, John Wiley & Sons, New York, (1999), the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.